EMC Customer Service: Our Hall Of Fame Achievements

By recently winning two STAR Awards from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), EMC earned a 5th TSIA Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award, only the second company to achieve this level in TSIA’s history.

The TSIA defines service excellence with a litany of specific criteria and for an organization as large as EMC, it’s no easy feat to maintain these standards year-to-year. We’d like to believe that only through the dedication, smarts and talent of our people and the close, honest relationships we enjoy with our customers that we are able to achieve these standards consistently.

For 2015, EMC won for:

  1. Best Practices in the Delivery of Field Service: EMC was recognized as the company that has most clearly and effectively delivered breakthrough results and established best practices in the improvement of customer, employee, and/or financial performance metrics within field services.
  2.  Innovation in Leveraging Analytics for Service Excellence: EMC was recognized for demonstrating it has best leveraged analytics to improve operational performance, service levels or the customer experience.

STAR

Why This Matters

TSIA’s STAR Awards are recognized as one of the highest honors in the technology services industry. Winning these awards brings me much joy, as it reinforces EMC’s position as one of the market leaders in customer service – providing a proactive, predictive support experience that helps customers achieve their targeted business outcomes.

Our Winning Approach

EMC Global Services has a three-pronged approach that has yielded us much success through the years. Without giving away all of the ingredients in our special sauce, here’s the approach we take:

  1. We Ask, Customers Respond, We Listen

EMC uses several listening channels to develop a 360¡ view of our customers’ perceptions and experiences across their journey of buying, deploying, and operating EMC products, solutions and services. When we ask, we truly want to hear how we can improve. It’s not about a survey score; it’s about the success of our customers — our number one priority. Our commitment to a customer-first approach permeates every level and aspect of EMC – a tradition that has been in place for more than 30 years.

  1. We Drink Our Own Kool-Aid®

For example, we use the EMC Federation Business Data Lake to gain insights into how our customers are using our products – insights that help us make informed business decisions and provide customers a proactive support experience that helps them identify issues before they ever impact their IT operations.

  1. We Enhance Our Products’ Serviceability

Our engineering teams are constantly asking themselves how we can make our products even easier to self-maintain. For example, by designing and empowering our customers to self-install Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs), our field service personnel can focus on being even more proactive in helping customers optimize the performance of their EMC technology.

STAR 2
(From left to right: Phil Lora, Frank Coleman, Kim Garbarino, Mary Cay Kosten, Ruya Atac-Barrett, Carolyn Muise, Shawn Murphy, Santiago Perez-Kolk)

I’m thrilled to congratulate EMC’s entire services team for a job well done. And while I’m incredibly proud of our work and the recognition that we’ve received, I’m even more proud knowing that we won’t rest on our laurels and will continue to look for ways to improve and provide the best customer experience possible.

About the Author: Mary Cay Kosten

Mary Cay leads a team of 1400 professionals that provide operational support to the Dell Technologies Services organization. Her team is responsible for driving operational excellence and implementing innovations across Dell Technologies Services. This includes areas such as eServices & Knowledge Management, Program and Change Management, Business Services, Remote Support Contact Center Operations, Command Center, Process Engineering and Data Sciences, Data Enablement and Analytics, and the Global Centers of Excellence. Kosten has over 30 years of experience in service and supplier management, with a proven track record in building outstanding service delivery organizations. Prior to joining Dell EMC, she was Vice President of global customer services delivery for Oracle/Sun Microsystems, responsible for delivering all elements of Sun Microsystems’ support services. Under her leadership, Sun achieved the prestigious J.D. Power Certified Technology Service and Support (CTSS) Award for "An Outstanding Customer Service Experience," the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) Award for Excellence in Service Operations, and Sun was inducted into the STAR Awards Hall of Fame. Kosten is a 2008 recipient of the Denver Business Journal's Outstanding Women in Business (High Tech and Telecommunications) Award and a 2006 recipient of the Silicon Valley YWCA Tribute to Women and Industry (TWIN) Award. She also is on the Advisory Board for TSIA’s Field Services discipline. She holds an MS degree in systems management from the University of Southern California and a BS in marketing from the University of West Florida.